Yeah, Ping, I agree. It reads like they missed the key lesson of C — in Dennis Ritchie's words, "A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do." And some of the things they've added vitiate some of C's key advantages — exceptions complicate the control flow, constructors and destructors introduce the execution of hidden code (which can fail), and even static overloading makes it easy to make errors about what operations will be invoked by expressions like "x + y".

An interesting exercise might be to figure out how to do the Golang feature set, or some useful subset of it, in a C-compatible or mostly-C-compatible syntax.

I do like the returnable tuples, though, and the parametric polymorphism is pretty nice.